Opinion Fifty-five years after Neil Armstrong's one small step, and the future it promised has not come to pass. Nobody has gone back to the Moon since the end of the Apollo program, let alone out to Mars. As for Clarke and Kubrick's oh-so-plausible 2001 trip to Jupiter with a hallucinating AI, well, one out of two isn't bad. But while those futures didn't happen, what we have instead is unimaginably better.

While so many have been staring wistfully at that iconic boot print in the lunar dust, others back on Earth have been blowing the doors off our understanding of space, time, and all the stuff that fills it. Perhaps there's more to space exploration than having humans physically present.

Think about it. When Apollo 17 left the Moon in 1972, there were nine planets known in the universe, before poor Pluto got demoted. 

As of July 2024, there are more than 5,500 confirmed, many thousands more in the pending list, and probably one apiece for the 100-400 billion stars in the galaxy. And while it took 3,000 years from the first Assyrian astronomers for humans to get to nine, we then jumped to over 600 times that number faster than it took Microsoft to evolve Windows 98 into a half-decent OS.

Ah yes, about that galaxy. Apollo-era star catalogs such as the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey - now digitized for your pleasure here - were compiled by eye from photographic plates, with a very rough total of tens of millions of objects listed. Today, just one recently repaired space observatory, ESA's Gaia, has mapped 2 billion - and by mapped, we mean captured in an incredible three-dimensional cosmic time machine.

Gaia has had a much lower public profile than its celestial cousins, the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. It doesn't return awe-inspiring pictures, and ESA is no match for NASA's awe-inspiring publicity machine. What it has returned is far more than a big list of stars: It has measured position, distance, and 3D velocity vectors, at up to 50 GB a day for ten years.

This has created huge databases that don't just show what's where at incredible precision, it shows where those stars are going, and, more importantly, where they've been. This has produced some mind-blowing discoveries, such as the solar system with us onboard surfing a wave of gas 9,000 light years long. There's also evidence that our star was born in a distant region called the Orion Spur, with thousands of siblings now scattered across the galaxy. Finding sister stars and their exoplanets is an exquisite prospect.

Much closer to home, Mars has gone from a blurry postcard to a familiar landscape full of surprises, such as Curiosity accidentally "running" over a rock that was full of elemental sulfur where no such rock had any right to be. That process of bringing the Red Planet up close and personal started with the Viking landers, a mission started several years after the end of Apollo. It is easy to focus on the conclusion of one era without recognizing the dawn of another.

Worse, we've got used to nuclear-powered laser robots with helicopter drones since then, gone so far as mapping and landing on Titan, a huge moon of Saturn with cryogenic oceans, and skimming over the ice mountains of Pluto. This wasn't just cool space exploration; they were staggering, visionary feats of engineering and science. Not by coincidence. They too follow in the footsteps of another post-Apollo mid-'70s pioneer, Voyager.

Silicon powering science

We live in an age of astrophysical miracles that come so thick and fast we've grown blind to how far we've come. It's rocket science that's powered this, it's silicon. Voyager proved that solid state computers could guide autonomous spacecraft through encounters far from human intercession. It also proved that we could repair and reconfigure failing systems from billions of kilometers away, giving us the confidence to invest in extravagant audacities like James Webb and Gaia.

That's before what silicon's given astrophysics on the ground. The industrial harvesting of data across the visible universe back to the Big Bang relies completely on supercomputing to store, sift, and supply enormous datasets. It provides the tools for astronomers to probe, model, and explore freely across space and time. And it creates a global network of open information that mixes everything together for that most precious gem of scientific discovery, serendipity. Everyone, from citizen scientists to flagship international projects, are welcome.

Take yet another miraculous machine, the LIGO gravitational wave observatory that can spot black holes colliding billions of years ago. Not good enough? It went on to spot neutron stars smashing into each other, which unlike black holes could produce a lot of detritus and energetic light. The alert went out to a battery of other observatories, which quickly found that light was replete with clues about where a lot of our elements come from.

That took a lot of silicon, which is apt. Silicon created the neutron stars in the first place through the final stage in stellar fusion called silicon burning, which creates a lot of useful elements just before a supernova kicks off. Also taking part in silicon burning, sulfur. Everything's connected, man.

This future, this firehose of discovery, isn't what Apollo envisioned. But it is the unexpected wunderkind of Apollo nonetheless. At the same time as Apollo was finishing and the true new age of discovery was starting in those strange mid-'70s, the commercial market in silicon semiconductors surpassed that of the military for the first time.

That latter market had driven chip technology through its expensive, stumbling early days. Apollo, Cold War missile engineering in crisp white civilian spacesuits, landed silicon in a new world where it could thrive and grow. Space science took off on the wings of Moore's Law just as much as those of Newton and Einstein. It's now at Warp 10 and accelerating.

Where is it taking us next? We haven't found extraterrestrial life yet, and we're in the dark about dark matter. JWST keeps coming up with new mysteries, which is its job after all. Myriad discoveries await, not only in the unvisited and unobserved physical cosmos, but in the petabytes of data already captured and awaiting the right question.

Apollo may have been for all mankind, but it was to look at, not to use. All these new and unutterably more magnificent discoveries are truly ours. These will be seen as legendary times for humanity's knowledge. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/29/opinion_column_space/